“I Know How to Read and All, but . . .”: Disciplinary Reading Constructions of Middle School Students of Color

This study explores the disciplinary literacy perspectives of middle school students of color attending urban parochial schools and the reader subject positions they took up across content-area classrooms. Qualitative analysis of 19 student interviews and accompanying observations of subject-area classes revealed that students’ constructions of reading, circumscribed by classroom literacy activities, inhibited discipline-specific reading subject positions. In particular, this study highlights how teachers’ reading activities promoted reading as being about accomplishing a task rather than being apprenticed in ways of taking discipline-specific knowledge from text. When the boundaries between students’ home literacy experiences and school disciplinary literacy experiences were more contiguous, and when more meaningful, authentic literacy experiences were provided, students evidenced deeper disciplinary literacy engagement. Educational implications, including troubling disciplinary knowledge to open the disciplines to wider ways of knowing and learning for all learners, are discussed.